Im/Perfect Schemas That We Are

In thinking about this critical blog post, and in working with my scholarly colleagues, Megan Keaton and Megan Roche, I couldn't help but be aware of a particular kind of tension. If I heard, that is truly heard what was being said – the current running underneath the words – it seems as though our group was wrestling for something closer to omniscience than situated knowledge. What I mean by this is simply that there was an expressed desire, even a felt need, to know in advance everything that should be known about the subject matter at hand. Stronger still, this desire or felt need presented itself as a kind of effervescence, repeatedly bubbling up to the surface in multiple expressions. At one point, Megan Roche went as far as to say that she somehow wished that we could take all of the information, without being exposed to any particular origin or starting point, and load into ourselves as one might load information into a computer. It certainly draws to mind images of Neo in The Matrix. The idea behind Megan’s desire, of course, was that by experiencing the material in this way, we might finally be able to avoid issues of hierarchy or prizing one position over another. In my own way, I admit that I am both understanding of this ethos, while horrified by it at the same time. So, rather than this being a very simple schematizing of the subject matter, and a useful way to synthesize a semester’s worth of questioning, it struck me as a particularly potent example of what young postmodern students wrestle with on a daily basis. It is my desire, then, to attend to that tension or conflict for a moment. After I have said a word about that, I will move on to our process of schematizing.

It should be noted from the start that everything that I'm about to say is meant as a compliment. Normally, when someone leads with a statement like that, you can just about expect something other than a compliment; but, I truly do see our struggle with "an origin" to be emblematic of self-reflexivity and a desire to be inclusive and more charitable in our scholarship. Meanwhile, it is also a result of cultivating a critical eye towards the summarily, the perfunctory, the uncomplicated beginning.

In the midst of working on this project with the Megans, I sometimes found myself temporarily checking out of the conversation in order to note what it was that I felt was being worked out between and among us. It was interesting for me, at the outset, to work in this group for a number of reasons. The first, and maybe most important and also most arbitrary, is that I simply don't have the opportunity to do much group work anymore. Anytime you work in a group, there's a particular kind of dynamic that develops between members. Sometimes this dynamic allows for what I might call a drawing–fourth of certain kinds of thoughts and expressions that might not have otherwise risen to the surface. This dynamic was definitely a play in our group, that is, at least for me. I approached this project in the same manner that I approach almost every other assignment: read the instructions, review the relevant material, think and take notes, and write my way into or out of a particular thesis. I want to acknowledge, then, what I perceive to be an intellectual gift given to me by this exploration. Both Megans brought with them so many questions that proceeded "the questions" of this schema. In differing ways, both Megan's stated that they were more interested in how we might start but not start. That is, they both wanted to complicate the issue of starting somewhere in particular. It was a push-pull kind of endeavor. It was an acknowledgment that if we start with Aristotle, it meant we weren't starting with Mao, Haraway or Hawhee etc. This I could readily understand and anticipated. What I could not have anticipated was the suggestion that if we, ourselves, were more like "the cloud" that housed knowledge in disembodied space, we might contend with the material more comprehensively. That is to say, our own biases, partial readings, misunderstandings, and proclivities might finally be prevented from impacting the project. Understood in this light, it would seem to suggest that the failure of invention is not so much a lack of critical desire to engage the material with integrity, but, in fact, a de facto failure of the human being. As I understood it at the time, what we wanted was something for which there was no need for partiality, because it was always-already-whole. I certainly think this is an interesting thread, which is why wanted to highlight it for a moment, before moving on.

One of the things that I have been thinking about all semester long, especially after reading Ong and Kuhn, is that you never know at the current moment what will turn out to be important knowledge for the future. That is, as we attempt to trace dominant discourse, dominant ideologies, and even prevailing issues in the news, we don't know that historicizing them will turn out to give future generations any insight into the past. In other words, collective, social, and institutional memory seem insufficient. There seems to be important gaps in the literature, in the experiments, in the archives, in the textbooks and in us, as embodied houses of knowledge. Most of what we know, or think that we know, as Burke said, has come to us in the form of signs and symbols – approximations of the real. As Bandura and other social psychologists and anthropologists have noted, learning, sharing, and transmitting knowledge was of utmost cultural and evolutionary importance. It was also, in their opinion, something that was slow to progress and rife with difficulties. Ong notes this precarity and suggests that certain types of technologies, such as movable type, relieve some of the constraints on memory and allow us to focus on content. Extrapolating upon his thought, it is not difficult to understand how and why students like us might have an easier time negotiating the concept of a non-originary origin. After all, the information that we are actively schematizing, has already been produced and stored for us. We no longer have the burden of housing the knowledge in ourselves and have largely automated that process. Philosophers of mind, like Chalmers, even argue that we have begun to see the computer or handheld device as an extension of our own consciousness.

One thing that I want to be careful of in my work, especially in thinking about the past, is how I attempt to echo the voice of those who have gone before me. What often looks to us as uncomplicated, unproblematic, and contestable very well could have seemed different at the time. Here, I am referring to the dual processes of historicizing and critiquing. Views that seem to us now as far removed, quaint, and even quite naïve were the projections of people living without the unbelievable resources we have available to us now. Basically, what I'm trying to wrap my head around is the very different (or in my mind what I perceive to be a very different) call to remember and critique what has been re-membered, re-produced. When knowledge was so incredibly fragile and subject to disappear at the slightest sign of famine or pestilence or sword, the exigency facing those peoples, our forebears, was entirely different. The poly-vocal, the polysemous, and the non-locatable beginning or looped-network-of-networks that we discussed in our group is as much about the here-and-now as it is about meta-scholarship. This is, perhaps, one reason why kairos still carries so much currency.

Our reinvention of the course material and how one theorist might relate to another was thoroughly kairotic and very much in the spirit of Bhaktin. In other words, we took a very dialogic stance to the process, letting ideas and connections emerge in the moment. By entering a dialogue with one another, and in situating this schema as a dialogue, linear constraints were removed from the process. In this way, we could constantly build on and away from one another's ideas in real time. This is quite a different mental task from comparing and contrasting Aristotle with other theorists. Rather than a pre-existing syllabus or a given origin leading us into discussion, that dynamic group process referred to above served as the facilitator of knowledge creation. In fact, I would like to go even further and say that dialogue itself stood in place of linearity. Sometimes when we think of dialogue, we think of it in these very structured pairings like we read/see in books or watch on TV. So, ours was not the kind of dialogue that can be found in a work of Socrates, where Plato says one thing and Gorgias another; it was messier than that; productive, but not tidy. Inventing in the moment or in real time, rather than the linear flow of writing a response and sharing it with the group so that they could respond in written fashion, dialogue allowed us the opportunity to critique, clarify, object, support, echo, or equivocate in each other's presence. In this sense, it was deeply humanizing. Faces and body language mediate communication in ways that are quite profound and often initiate an affective or visceral response. In other words, the creative process was spurred along by attuning ourselves to the group. I'm not suggesting that the only way to participate in democratic scholarship is to sit around dialoguing, but I am suggesting that is a profitable way to share and learn – both about the material and one another. I didn't just get a sense of what either Megan thought about Erasmus, I got a sense of how they were in the process of thinking. Meaning, in some small way I could see how they connected dots; how tired or energetic they were; whether they liked a theorist or no; whether they were having to contend with the rabid ringing, chirping or whistling of a cellphone or Facebook message. For me, I learned as much about the material as I did my two group members. In that way, I feel that my life has been enriched and my view on the material challenged.

I've gone on long enough and yet haven't come close to saying much of what I wish I could communicate. Sigh. Such is life. I do want to end by saying that during this semester, stronger than any time I can remember, I sense the return of the Baconian understanding of the encyclopedic knowledge of human being. That is, in the yearnings expressed by our group, I could hear echoes of Bacon in this quest for omniscience – that gift God gave to prelapsarian Adam and Eve. The knowledge of the world and the things in it that allowed Adam to perfectly name every creature according to its kind. That gift of knowledge that was surrendered in the fall and has been sought ever sense. I want to push against that. I want to push against the idea of perfect knowledge or perfected knowledge, especially as it relates to anything produced by humans or machines for that matter. I can think of few things more undemocratic, more limiting than this idea of perfected knowledge – closed to future negotiations. Haraway’s corrective attempts to put us on better grounding by admitting explicitly that all knowledge is partial, situated, and necessarily incomplete. This allows us to enter into the dialogue, rather than being closed off from it by perfection. Part of what made this class and this assignment challenging and fulfilling is this very real sense that invention is a creative act, even when drawing resources from loci or topoi. We each encounter the material on our own terms, in our own reading spaces, in our own bodies, and in the midst of so many unvoiced and unconscious challenges. What we think about can never entirely be disentangled from our experiential world. What I think about a given theorist at this point in time, with the present exigencies that attend my daily life, will necessarily color how her ideas are received. For now, I am greatly contented by this idea. It is imperfect. I may need to be corrected, but that just insurers that I always need community as a corrective. If it were the case that we could know everything in advance, that omniscience was our daily bread, what we would gain in perfect objectivity (whatever that means) would be at the expense of subjectivity and the beauty of our own imperfect inventive processes.